By Mahmood Ansari
Zubeen Garg, while already established in the music industry of Assam, did leave his home for Mumbai only to return back, and call his native soil his kingdom. Retrospectively speaking, it was a return journey not merely to rejoice over the success and wealth that had come to him but also to accomplish something credible for his fellow beings back home. Arriving on the scene in a different avatar – versatile but an iconoclast, entrenched but defiant, and philanthropist but a socialist, the returnee singer did evolve into a political persona.
Being selfless and an emotionally vulnerable one, he could have chosen to join the insurgent movement but he didn’t. Reaching the apex of his musical accomplishments, he could have even joined a mainstream political party. Again, he opted out.
He did choose the alternative – often challenging the faith and habits of religion, periodically passing satirical remarks on the media and the politics of the day, and unfailingly standing for unity and fraternity amidst the ethos and pathos of a society fractured and fragmented by the memories of sectarian political agitations and turbulences of the 1990s and early twenty-first century Assam.
Rare are the occasions of a budding legend but an established music icon risking his reputation, and consciously jumping into controversies. It is always a hard choice. This icon of music, song and films in Assam did however make such a choice, once he was settled in his native land and amongst his own people.
Before meeting with the sudden tragic demise in the sea waters of Singapore in the wake of which the whole of Assam plunged into a three-day deep mourning, he was recurringly dominating the public discourse and controversies.
Deserving the recognition for the kind of accomplishments he had in the arena of playing music, singing songs and acting in movies, he began to stand as a prominent but odd-man out in the budding civil society of Assam. Excelling in a marvellous way on the landscape of the industry of songs and music for the last three decades (and also in acting and directing regional films), the budding rebel systematically divorced with his identities.
He dropped his official certificate name of Jobin Borthakur (a Brahmin title), discarded the Janaeu (sacred thread) from his body, got his arm tattooed with the figure of Charlie Chaplin signifying the message of fall but not fail, and began to put on a variety of headgears and caps on his head in the manner of Che Guevera.
Following his demise, an unprecedented funeral procession, along the convoy of the mortal body in Guwahati, was a reminder of not only the decay of a cultural heartthrob but also a benefactor of the distressed and a speaker of truth to power.
Presumably meeting a premature death by drowning in the sea, he left an imprint as one of the most beloved sons of the soil, and drew hundreds of thousands of natives and tourists to walk down the streets and the roads of Assam to mourn his untimely demise. All along the saddened mourners sang the song “Mayabini Ratir Bukut” song for the middle-aged man of 52 years, whose demise opens a new chapter in Assam.
Carrying an aura of arrogance (which he called self-respecting pride), often dropping the cannons of civility rather sarcastically, and standing fearlessly on the streets and local eateries along with the members of the subaltern section of the society, he was not very popular with the upper echelons of the Assamese society.
While standing for the flood victims and dislocated people, he opted to be fearlessly notorious – without preoccupation with the standards of civility and decency. It was provocative. As an avowed social leftist, he left behind his messages of open and candid opposition to racism, parochialism and sectarianism.
While alive, he had to his credit the well-recognised and diligently achieved honour of composing almost more than thirty eight thousand songs in over three dozen languages and dialects and being proficient in playing more than a dozen musical instruments on the public stage.
In addition to the Assamese song of 2001 under the title, ”Mayabini,” he was awarded with a national accolade for a Hindi song “Ya Ali” in 2007. Though a drop-out from the Graduate College, he was privileged to be an awardee of an honorary DLitt degree by a private science and technology university of Meghalaya in 2024. He was not as well-read and formally educated as the late Bhupen Hazarika.
Those achievements merely created a cultural aura of the man, and that would certainly be followed and imitated by the novice and the apprentice in the arena of music and culture. The song was one genre of the message of the messenger. His anecdotes which are etched in our memories and his maverick speech-lines on the stage and in the streets were what he is remembered for. His acts of defiance and non-conformism would remain etched in public memory across Assam and the North East. His legacy will live forever.
(The writer is Professor of Economics, Assam University)
